Depends on which stream you are.... - Analyst-Economist Statistics Canada Employee Review

While there are certainly many pros to working at StatCan, it all depends on WHICH stream you are in. IF you are in I.T., methodology or accounting, then this is a great place to not only build your career, but to also develop skills relevant to your profession. IF you are however an EC, then you will most likely have very little opportunity to develop a marketable and transferable skill set. As a so-called "Analyst-Economist", you will gain experience mainly in the verification of economic data, which is really just manual spot checks and making sure its consistent with the previous year and with a variety of data sources (in other words, grunt work). Most of the work is monotonous, repetitive and can easily be automated. This is true of most of the EC work at StatCan, though your experience may vary depending on which team/projects you get into. You generally, will not have experience doing economic analysis, modeling, simulation, econometrics or any truly analytical work. That's left for the analysts and economist who work outside of StatCan, your only job is to compile the data, not analyze it. And as another poster said, the programming is left up to the I.T. people and the quantitative analysis to the methodology people, which means the only thing you are responsible for is basic data administration and compilation. As a result, most of the ECs have very few skills to transfer out of there, and end up being unhappy and depressed at what they do. In fact, the only ECs that I have met that enjoy what they do are those who are remote sensing and GIS experts, and that's because they actually work as specialized "professionals".